One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman Book Review

One Hundred Names for Love Book Review

Pub. 2011 - 322 pp

One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing is a recent memoir and beautiful love story by critically-acclaimed author Diane Ackerman. Diane and her significantly older husband, Paul West, share a love for words. They are both logophiles who center their lives among words, poetry and writing. When her husband suffers a massive stroke in his late seventies, the damage to his brain leaves him with aphasia – the inability to understand language. Their greatest connection was severed.

Diane met Paul while she was an undergraduate at Penn State and he was a professor of literature. She enrolled in his advanced class meant for graduates: Contemporary British Literature. Semesters later, they fell in love and remained side-by-side for the next forty years. Although they had their stark differences in taste, they shared a passion for words. It bound them together and kept their love alive and fresh. While they worked separately, writing in different genres, they supported each other as first and last readers of new work. When they weren’t working, they were playing – with words. It was a unique love affair all their own.

Paul begins to have a few medical problems. Nothing severe, at first. But the seemingly harmless issues cascade into complications and infection, further compounded by the medications for one ailment causing another. The stroke happens when a contaminated blood clot from one of his infections travels to his brain. Although it occurs while he is at the hospital, there is nothing they can do to immediately stop the damage to his brain. When Paul finally recovers, he can’t speak. All he can do is utter one syllable over and over again: MEM.

The doctors diagnose him with extreme aphasia. Paul is unable to understand what is spoken to him or what he reads, and he has no ability to communicate with anyone. His prognosis is grim. The doctors advise Diane that the best she can hope for is for Paul to be able to understand and perform about 80% of basic commands such as ‘sit down’ or ‘use a spoon’. Diane is overwhelmed with grief for her husband and despair for her new life as a caregiver which is about to begin.

Her worries fade away when Paul makes significant strides in speech and comprehension while at the hospital. The doctors, nurses and therapists don’t understand him – but she does. What seems like nonsensical words to the doctors, Diane recognizes as actual rare and abstract words he had stored in another part of his brain. She realizes that he is desperately reaching for these strange and obscure words to substitute for the common words he just can’t seem to find. Diane does research, studies medical works on the brain and aphasia, and reads about other authors who have suffered from the same malady. Diane takes Paul home and immediately dedicates herself to rebuilding his brain.

I would immediately recommend this book to anyone who has been left as the caregiver for a stroke victim. This memoir tackles the very real fears that a spouse will face when their significant other suffers from the after-effects of a stroke. In the beginning of the novel, when Diane is first faced with Paul’s prognosis, she begins to deeply worry about losing her own life to become the caregiver. She also wonders how she will cope emotionally and if she is even physically up to the task. These are the very real concerns that can weigh heavily upon the shoulders of anyone who is faced with this predicament. At first I was worried that this would turn into a sob story all about Diane. But it quickly moved from her doubts to Paul’s progress. That’s the other great facet of this novel – the hope which it instills. After the doctors gave Paul such a negative prognosis, she saw hope in the words Paul was able to utter. She dismissed their doubts and worked with her husband every day to activate his brain, rewire it and develop new connections within. She didn’t give up, she didn’t throw in the towel. Diane was going to bring her husband back from the mental prison where he was entombed.

Diane Ackerman is a novelist and a brilliant poet. The book was filled with the most beautiful expressions and purple prose. One Hundred Names for Love is an absolutely beautiful read – each sentence seems carefully carved with character and elegance. That being said, it does get a bit repetitive. She discusses their love for words and how the stroke ruptured this connection in every single chapter and in umpteen different ways – but beautifully done each time.

The title, One Hundred Names for Love, represents a new list of names that Diane asked Paul to come up with after he was unable to recall the terms of endearment he used to have for his wife. It is a new task among many (post-stroke homework) Diane uses to encourage Paul, forcing him to use his mental faculties. She lists all one hundred of Paul’s new names for Diane in the back of the book and my husband and I had fun one evening going through them. My favorites were the ones that made me laugh such as: Apostle of Radiant Postage Stamps, Goddess of Abstract Conversation and Autobiography of an Almond. My husband preferred: Golden Little Dreamer, My Little Bucket of Hair and Romantic Little Dew-Sipper.

One Hundred Names for Love was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prizeand afinalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award.

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Rebecca Skane

Rebecca is the founder of the Portsmouth Book Club. Google it. It's free to join! Follow me on Goodreads! Read Full